In John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, the pilgrims cannot reach the Celestial City without passing through Vanity Fair, where everything is bought and sold. In recent years there has been much analysis of commerce and consumption in Britain during the long eighteenth century, and of the dramatic expansion of popular publishing. Similarly, much has been written on the extraordinary effects of the evangelical revivals of the eighteenth century in Britain, Europe, and North America. But how did popular religious culture and the world of print interact? It is now known that religious works formed the greater part of the publishing market for most of the century. What religious books were read, and how? Who chose them? How did they get into people's hands? Vanity Fair and the Celestial City is the first book to answer these questions in detail. It explores the works written, edited, abridged, and promoted by evangelical dissenters, Methodists both Arminian and Calvinist, and Church of England evangelicals in the period 1720 to 1800. Isabel Rivers also looks back to earlier sources and forward to the continued republication of many of these works well into the nineteenth century. The first part is concerned with the publishing and distribution of religious books by commercial booksellers and not-for-profit religious societies, and the means by which readers obtained them and how they responded to what they read. The second part shows that some of the most important publications were new versions of earlier nonconformist, episcopalian, Roman Catholic, and North American works. The third part explores the main literary kinds, including annotated bibles, devotional guides, exemplary lives, and hymns. Building on many years' research into the religious literature of the period, Rivers discusses over two hundred writers and provides detailed case studies of popular and influential works.

CELESTIAL CITY AND ANTI-VANITY FAIR, with its Bunyan-like connotations, brings what John O'Loughlin had been building towards in previous books, such as 'Yang and Anti-Yin' and 'Lamb and Anti-Lion', to its logical conclusion, underlining the gender distinctions that exist at all points of what he calls the intercardinal axial compass, so that a more comprehensively exacting approach to terminology is possible and categorically upheld. Hence the metaphysical and antimetachemical implications of the title are reflected on a parallel terminological basis which it becomes a philosophical principle and moral duty to systematically embrace.

Thackeray's most representative novel - a picture of society on a broad scale, with Becky Sharp, the adventuress, a principal character. Includes a famous account of the Battle of Waterloo. First published in 1848.

There's a set of books which you're just supposed to know about, at least if you live in The West and fancy the idea of being thought 'educated'. There's the Bible, Shakespeare, James Joyce, Walter Scott and Machiavelli. Dr Jekyll, Tiny Tim, Starbuck, Socrates, Mr. Scrooge, Raskolnikov, Einstein and Enkidu. The Brontes and Boswell, Wordsworth, Newton Confucius and Don Quixote. Here they all are. 100 of the most quoted, most known, works of all time, in the original author's own words, but squashed up into nice little abridgements you can read in an hour or so. Little versions which smell and sound just like the originals. And ... with The Hundred Books it becomes possible to read the whole thing as a single narrative, to discover a Pisgah View of the written history of the great grand thing of how We got where We are now, in way that's just impossible for ordinary mortals. Read the lot, you'll love it, and you'll never, ever, be bored in an airport again.

The essays in this volume take stock of recent scholarly developments and revisit old assumptions about the significance of Augustine of Hippo for political thought. They do so from many different perspectives, examining the anthropological and theological underpinnings of Augustine's thought, his critique of politics, his development of his own political thought, and some of the later manifestations or uses of his thought in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and today. This new vision is at once more bracing, more hopeful, and more diverse than earlier readings could have allowed.